Y2K for librarians: exactly what you need to do

摘要

Preparing your library for the year 2000 and all of its possible catastrophes can seem like a daunting task. Read on for a list of the steps you should be taking now. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to determine your library's year-2000 (Y2K) risk. The effort will be time consuming, but it is essential. What will actually happen come January 1, 2000? What will fail? What will work? Though the programming to fix this date problem is pretty basic, unearthing and testing all of the hardware and software we rely on every day is mind boggling. So what do we do? Where do we start? While the clock is ticking, we still have time to address at least the critical applications in our libraries. This article will help you get organized and make priority decisions based on your Y2K risk. Don't Worry, Absolutely Everything Will Not Quit on Us Not all computers and software applications will fail. Actually, there is no problem at all unless a programmer programmed a two-digit date that is being manipulated or displayed in some way. Most applications make no use of a date, so there will be no problem. For computer hardware, some estimates are that 93 percent of computers built before 1996 will have the most problems automatically rolling over to 1/1/2000. This figure is reported to drop off to 11 percent for computers built in 1998. In addition, you can change the date manually on many computers manufactured as early as 1996 (Spector, Lincoln. "2000: The Year of Living Dangerously." PC World. January 1999, p. 92). Often a date is only used for a single feature, like logging statistics or scheduling a future event. In these cases, perhaps the worst-case scenario would be that a scrambled date is displayed or that the function has to be done manually until a permanent fix can be made. The computer will still boot, and the application will still run.